Incommensurabilité et langage poétique selon Julia Kristeva : l’échelle défiée

The aim of this article is to explore the question of incommensurability in poetic language based on the reflections of Julia Kristeva (Kristeva 1969 and Kristeva 1974), with the conclusion that poetic language is not scalable and therefore belongs to those phenomena that fall within the realm of the incommensurable. Through the analysis of the notions of the semiotic and the symbolic, as well as the distinction between genotext and phenotext, the article seeks to highlight the nature of the scalar trajectory that Kristeva envisions in the process of meaning formation, where the signifier unfolds progressively across different levels of materiality and symbolic structuring. Poetry, particularly in the work of Mallarmé, presents itself as a liminal space in which language exhibits its materiality, its bodily grounding, and its openness to that which exceeds its communicative function; yet for Kristeva, the space of poetry is a radically other space, one that destabilizes even the subject as she conceives it. It is in this non-scalable space, where meaning is never fully given but tends toward infinity, that the subject ceases to exist and no scale can account for it.